If you make less than $47,476.00, you may be entitled to a substantial amount of unpaid overtime by your employer due to a change in California and federal employment law.

For legal background, there are two employee classifications in California: exemptemployees and non-exemptemployees.

Exempt employees are not entitled to overtime for any hours worked in excess of eight hours per day or 40 hours per week, meal breaks every five hours, rest breaks every four hours, and other protections. A non-exempt employee could work 100 hours per week and not be entitled to anything but their regular salary (ie. $60,000 per year). A properly classified non-exempt employee must be paid a minimum salary of $47,476 beginning December 1, 2016, and must spend 51% of their time performing non-exempt job duties, such as supervising of other employees or perform high-level office work, like accounting or human resources.

Non-exempt employees are entitledto overtime, breaks, and many other protections. For example, a non-exempt employee would be entitled to 20 hours at 1.5 times their regularly hourly rate if they worked 60 hours per week. Statistically, most employees are non-exempt, even employees that spend some time managing other workers or who perform non-manual office work.

Employers regularly misclassify employees as “exempt” to avoid rigorous obligations to pay overtime and provide breaks. However, there is a common misperception among workers and employers that an employer simply needs to pay an employee a flat salary, rather than an hourly wage, in order to classify an employee as “exempt” from overtime. Payment of a salary rather than an hourly wage is just oneof many factors in determining whether an employee is properly classified.

Moreover, beginning December 1, 2016, all exempt employees must be paid a minimum salary of $47,476in order to be properly classified as exempt. This means that any worker paid under $47,476 must be paid overtime and be provided with rest breaks beginning December 1, 2016.

The new law means that many exempt employees will be getting a pay raise to $47,476 or more beginning December 1, 2016, or will be converted to hourly-paid employees. However, many employers may not change their policies in light of the new law.